US president-elect Donald Trump has indicated that he will again withdraw his country from the Paris agreement and perhaps the UN climate process altogether. The uncertainty this has created was palpable in the negotiation rooms and hallways of the Cop29 climate summit in Baku, Azerbaijan, where I wrote this.
I have studied the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and its global assessments of scientific knowledge for over 15 years and have followed how its most recent reports are being used in official climate negotiations. As I document in my book, the US and its domestic politics has influenced the organisation of global climate science, and the climate agreements that depend on it, since the IPCC was established in 1988.
From the outset, proposals from the US were influential in the design of a specifically “intergovernmental” body to provide the world with climate science, rather than one lead by scientists themselves. This gave governments a central role in the organisation and its assessment process. Most notably, governments had line-by-line approval of the most read component of the thousand page IPCC reports: the much shorter Summary for Policymakers.
